With SpaceX’s historic initial public offering minting a small army of new millionaires overnight, the Southern California housing market is bracing for a big wave of buyers looking to upgrade their digs or perhaps snag a second home, potentially driving up prices in some in-demand neighborhoods.
Shares of SpaceX started trading June 12 and ended the day having raised $75 billion and making founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. It was by far the largest IPO on record, more than double the 2019 offering by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco.
At least 4,000 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires, with about 400 of them earning $100 million or more, said Andrew Benson, chief executive of Hill.com, an investment platform for trading stock in pre-IPO tech companies.
SpaceX’s compensation philosophy historically favored equity over cash salaries, so this windfall extends well beyond executives and engineers to include nontechnical staff, entry-level workers and even cafeteria employees.
Because SpaceX has its highest concentration of employees in humble Hawthorne south of the 105 Freeway, the homebuying spree is expected to be most pronounced in the sandy South Bay and the “Silicon Beach” tech corridor that includes Venice and Santa Monica, but it may also appear in other upmarket Los Angeles-area neighborhoods or even farther away in the form of second homes.
One SpaceX buyer has been eyeing a $32-million pocket listing of his in tony Brentwood for months while waiting for the IPO, according to real estate broker Cory Weiss of Douglas Elliman.
“People are starting to look,” he said, and most will spend $5 million or more.
Melissa Pilon, a real estate agent in the South Bay with Compass, heard from one SpaceX buyer the day the company went public on a property in north Redondo Beach, and expects to hear from more would-be homeowners.
“I’m not sure how this will play out, but I think real estate agents are feeling optimistic,” Pilon said. “I think there will definitely be an uptick, but I don’t know if it will be a sustainable thing. There might be some superficially inflated prices.”
The SpaceX IPO and planned initial public offerings of OpenAI and Anthropic could generate millions in capital gains tax revenue for the state over years as shareholders cash out.
Even without inclusion of those IPOs, state finance officials this year upped their forecast of capital gains income Californians would earn due to the huge run-up in the stock market driven by AI companies. On average, gains are taxed at 10%.
While SpaceX shares have fallen recently, current and former employees who were granted shares or options still would come away winners given the stock remains above the $135 IPO price. Shares closed Friday at $153.23, up 0.15%.
It could take several months for the housing market to feel the full effect of SpaceX millions, said Paul Habibi, a UCLA lecturer and real estate expert witness at Grayslake Advisors.
The most significant buying boom is likely to take place early next year, he predicted, after the standard lockup on stock sales is fully ended in December. Batches of limited stock sales will be allowed in the coming months, however, and some real estate agents and bankers are putting together workarounds to help expectant millionaires leverage their future gains to secure loans.
Habibi expects the largest concentration of purchases to be focused in the South Bay, primarily Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach, with some spillover into Culver City and possibly north Orange County.
The gush of new money stands to drive up the cost of homes in neighborhoods already in hot demand, echoing a pattern that has occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“A place like Manhattan Beach has roughly 11,000 housing units, so there could be a pretty significant impact if a lot of those folks decide that they want to go buy houses in those neighborhoods that have such a supply constraint,” Habibi said. “Those markets are already among the priciest in Southern California and I can only imagine that will continue with this new wealth creation.”
Hermosa Beach real estate agent Ed Kaminsky agrees interest will center in the South Bay, including Palos Verdes, and he has already heard from prospective SpaceX buyers. Their dream houses have ocean views, swimming pools and four or more bedrooms, which may be hard to find.
“There are a lot of buyers that were in rentals from the Palisades fire looking to buy now and combined with all of the IPOs this summer, I think inventory in South Bay could be tight,” Kaminsky said, “The question is whether we have the kinds of properties on the market that they’re looking for.”
The concentration of buyers looking to purchase property in the South Bay could temporary inflate prices in the area, similar to when Snap Inc., social media platform Snapchat’s parent company, went public in 2017 valued at $24 billion, Habibi said. SpaceX by comparison was valued at $1.77 trillion.
“What’s interesting about Snap is that the workforce was largely clustered on the Westside, and you could see almost immediate effects in Venice and Santa Monica within months of the IPO,” Habibi said. “That was a pretty notable and significant effect on that local housing market” that temporarily inflated prices in an already hot market.
“The amount of wealth and how it comes into L.A. is always very different and vacillates,” Weiss said. “I’m not saying this is groundbreaking and nothing like L.A.’s ever seen before, but I do know that there are people who have been waiting for this to happen.”
Among them are potential buyers who have toured condominiums in Century City, where some of the region’s most luxurious condo towers stand, he said.
Certain buyers may want to buy a condo in a fancy full-service building in L.A. to use as a pied-à-terre, Weiss said, while moving their families to a distant city or state where they could commute by plane on weekends.
San Diego County should see an influx of new buyers with SpaceX dollars, said Del Mar real estate agent Kristina Quesada, co-owner of the Yost Quesada Team at Douglas Elliman. They’ll join a recent wave of house hunters from the Bay Area flush with new tech fortunes and an appetite for second homes or vacation properties near the ocean.
Buyers want to “obtain that coastal lifestyle” for less money than it would cost in other California waterfronts, she said. Popular San Diego County locations run west of Interstate 5 from Carlsbad south through such seaside communities as Encinitas, Del Mar, La Jolla and Coronado Island. Prices start around $2 million.
San Francisco real estate agent Butch Haze of Compass has seen tech booms followed by ravenous bursts of homebuying since the first internet gold rush of the late 1990s.
“Show me a great job market and I’ll show you a really strong real estate market,” he said.
San Francisco’s surging tech industry, which is getting a burst of new business around artificial intelligence, may even have a knock-on effect on Los Angeles-area real estate, Haze said.
After making a fortune through an IPO or acquisition of their companies, “the single tech guys love to move down to L.A. to be closer to the beautiful people,” Haze said. “And they get their beachfront property.”
